


Breaking A Fever

by apiphile



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: First Time, Hurt/Comfort, Illness, M/M, secrecy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-22
Updated: 2010-02-22
Packaged: 2017-10-07 11:32:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/64763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The book says schnapps and Apfelstrudel were the cure, but I like to think this was a much more efficacious remedy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Breaking A Fever

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zellamsee](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=zellamsee).



> While on the road, Sergeant Lipton became ill, with chills and a high fever. […]
> 
> Lieutenant Speirs and Sergeant Lipton had a room in a German house for the night. (Alsace, on the border between France and Germany, changes hands after every war. In 1871 it became German again, in 1945, French.) The room had only a single bed. Speirs said Lipton should sleep on it. Lipton replied that it wasn't right; as the enlisted man, he would sleep in his sleeping bag on the floor. Speirs simply replied, "You're sick," which settled it.  
> __
> 
> Band of Brothers, "The Patrol", pg 224.

 

After spending so long under fire it was hard not to think of the arrival of a less explosive but equally insidious enemy in the aggressive light. _Bombarded by uncontrollable sneezing, 0800 hours_, Lipton solemnly reported to himself. _Advance of high temperature followed shortly afterward. Only possible course of action: cover nose and mouth while spraying boogers everywhere, so as not to infect rest of platoon._

The house had the warmth of a building only recently vacated; further down the broad street soldiers knocked sharply on doors and gave their mangled interpretations of "Du hast fünf Minuten zu ausgangen " to the families inside. Carwood Lipton made a mental note to be even _more_ grateful for shelter when the walls of the room had stopped pulsating and his sinuses didn't feel like they were being marched on.

"We're in this room," Speirs said, appearing behind him like a wraith, and Lipton found the only response he could really manage was a tired nod. After a prod in the small of the back he got it together to follow the Lieutenant up a wide wooden stairway and into the smallest of three bedrooms. The room was more luxury than he'd been expecting, the wallpaper still intact and winking clean and blue; a stark contrast to the bedraggled and exhausted soldiers steaming gently in the middle of it. Speirs had a streak of mud on his forehead; Lip wasn't sure he didn't have the same, and knew damn well he hadn't shaved in too long.

There was a single narrow bed against the far wall, still made, a light dusting of ceiling plaster on the eiderdown the only sign of any artillery activity in the town.

"Yours," Speirs said with typical economy of words, already sitting on the floor and making the smart move of unlacing his boots to air his socks while he still had the chance.

Lip frowned; it hurt his face, and the whole set of features felt strange - calcified, kinda like his nose had paralysed the rest of it or turned it into a mask - and much too cold. "Sir, I'm only an NCO – give me a minute to get my sleeping bag. I should be on the floor." The bed looked like a thing from a hotel, and after foxholes and trucks and bunks the only way it could look _more_ inviting was if there was a roast dinner next to it and a cute girl _in_ it. But no matter how inviting the bed looked, there was no way he could sleep in the bed while any Lieutenant – especially not Lieutenant _Speirs_ \- took the floor.

"Lip," Speirs said, looking up from removing his second boot with an unreadable expression, "you're _sick_."

There wasn't really much Lip could say to that, although his cold sweats took a moment to suggest that pathetic gratitude on his part would probably be appropriate if not very dignified or well-received. Speirs had already stretched out on the floor, his boots lined up perfectly with his feet, and stuffed his hands behind his head by the time Lip got stiffly into the bed.

Exhausted as he was, Lip still found it hard to sleep. The bed seemed to close around him like a giant mouth – probably just that it was so much softer than anything he'd slept on for months, he thought, but it didn't help him settle. He was sweating into his eyes and shaking all at once. He felt half-ashamed: the mud and the fever-sweat on him would ruin the sheets. When he was gone the family they had displaced would have to return and throw away these previously pristine pieces of fabric, now all stinking of sick Sergeant Lipton.

Somewhere in between this thought and the next almighty shiver he was pitched into a dream: crawling shoulder-deep in mud and corpses, the suffocating sludge falling back on top of him and the ever-present thunder of shells slowly drowning out as the muck filled his ears, his nose, his mouth – so he struck upwards like a swimmer for shore, knowing as he did so that he had just given his position away. That any minute now a bullet would zip through his shoulder or the back of his neck – his helmet was missing – the hands of the dead clutched at his shoulders, begging him to stay down -

"Shh, before you wake everyone else up," Speirs said patiently, holding a single finger over Lip's dry mouth. Lipton stared around him quickly; it had to be later in the night now, since the moon was fully up and shedding a razorblade of blue-white against the opposite wall, through the gap in the incongruously laundered curtains. Speirs was awake, alert, bent over the bed with one hand holding in Lip's panicked cries and the other stretched back to hold his kicking legs down.

Shame flooded through him as swiftly as the nightmare's engulfing mud had flowed over him. "Sorry, I –"

"Fever dreams," Speirs said dismissively. "Not your fault." He looked poised despite the bland tone of his voice, ears pricked, head cocked, listening to the sounds of the house, the scrabble of mouse claws on wooden floors. Like a fox disturbed in the night. Lip tried to will himself back into unconsciousness, but the feeling if not the clear memory of asphyxiating in a soup of the dead and of the earth still clung to him. "What were they?"

"What?"

"The dreams."

"I don't remember." Lip frowned; the only clear thing that remained was the feeling of something disgusting against his skin, and that could just as easily be the sweat that swamped him. Speirs was still hung over him, his hair tumbling over his forehead like ivy, his eyes sweeping Lip's face with a kind of dead-eyed curiosity. Lip's hair – what there was of it, Lipton thought wryly – laid plastered flat against his skull. "Was I yelling?"

"Just thrashed about a bit." He was lying – skilled as he was at keeping a poker face, Speirs was in too close to hide the way his pupils expanded, contracted, expanded again. Lipton felt every dreamer's cold twist in his stomach of worry for what he might have revealed. Unless it was the fever. A second later he quashed it as ridiculous; he had nothing to hide from anyone in Easy, least of all its commander.

"You should go back to sleep," Speirs said, not making a move. He'd not moved his hand far from Lip's mouth after shushing him, and the pressure of his palm over Lip's knees was still there, warm and strong and unaccountably comforting. His eyes bored through Lip's, back into his mind, right through the back of his skull. What hell it must be to be on the wrong side of this man …

"We both should," Lip said; his voice cracked at the end of the sentence and, after too long a pause to swallow, he added, "Sir."

There followed a silence so long and heavy that Lip wondered if Speirs had somehow fallen asleep standing up, with his eyes open and his hand still clenched over Lip's kneecaps. He wouldn't have put it past him. But it was not the case, and Speirs roused himself from whatever reverie had detained him, and gave Lip one of those impenetrable smiles he'd been offering recently. Y'had to wonder if he'd been taking lessons from Captain Winters – he was the only other person Lip could think of who smiled like that - and he'd not quite gotten it right. Winters gave these warm half-smiles that made you feel like you'd done your best and you were gonna go on doing even better than your best, just to make sure his confidence in you wasn't misplaced. Speirs … Lieutenant Speirs made you uneasy and relaxed at the same time. Sometimes one of those brief smiles was a reassurance that whatever it was he'd been thinking about, it wasn't kicking your ass; sometimes it was like he was wondering whether or not he could get away with serving you up as company dinner. That was the right word: _hungry_.

Y'had to wonder, lying on this stupidly soft bed, that hand giving his knee a friendly and reassuring squeeze, whether he smiled like that at anyone else. Probably. Probably he'd smiled this quick, sharp smile at anyone who'd warranted it, and it was only fever that made him think it made Speirs look like a half-starved fox faced with a plate of pork.

"Okay, Sergeant?" Speirs was frowning at him. "Thought you were going to pass out for a minute there."

"Okay as any other man," Lip said, giving Spiers his wryest smile and his hoarsest voice, trying to straighten his shoulders while flat on his back. Better than Frank Perconte, still limping around with his ass wound and refusing to sit down – not, of course, that he actually could. "Thumping fit, sir." He was rewarded with a snort and a hand on his forehead, testing his temperature with all the diligence of someone's mom.

Hard to say whether the hand was warm and his head cold, as it felt at first, or his head boiling and the hand mercifully cold, as it more likely was. Either way he knew he kind of wanted it to stay there, a small patch of sensible heat against the ravages of whatever it was that was gluing him to the sheets. Because god_damn_ but this sickness was making him selfish. Trying to make the Lieutenant stay put when he should be sleeping.

"You have some funny idea of 'fit for service'," Speirs informed him, his hand pressed against Lip's forehead still, "burning up like that."

"Maybe if I was _at home_ I'd take to bed and lie around grousing," Lip said more pointedly than he meant to. "But the men need me here –"

"And the officers," Speirs said quietly, giving him another lightning-fast smile that, this time, even reached his eyes and shed some of the deadness that usually filmed them. "A good NCO is hard to come by." He looked like he was going to say something else, but cut it off. Lip's cheeks felt rosy. "High fever or blushing like a girl." His hand did not move.

Lipton averted his gaze.

Speirs' hand was above his knee now.

"I shouldn't be depriving you of a bed," Lip croaked, eventually.

Speirs gave him an unreadable look – and damn, was he good at those – and said, "I thought I told you that you were sleeping in the bed, Sergeant. Didn't I make myself clear?"

"Actually, sir, you said I was sick."

"Aren't you?"

Lip conceded that he might be, still shivering under the warmth of his uniform, these borrowed blankets and the weight of Lieutenant Speirs, who was now half-sitting on the edge of the bed. He might be, with his skin clammy and his mouth drier than road grit.

"Then you are sleeping in the bed, Sergeant Lipton." Speirs jerked another incomprehensible smile onto his face and added ahead of Lip's protest, "And that's an order. Getting out of bed for any reason before dawn - besides pissing - will result in dire sanctions. I expect my NCOs to set an example." Only the tiniest twitch at the corner of his mouth said that he wasn't entirely serious; the way his thumb fell from beside his hand and tentatively, surreptitiously stroked Lip's eyebrow said something else. It said something Lip wanted to claim he didn't understand, even though he understood very well. He understood military prison and court-martial pretty damn well too.

What he should have done was turn his head away and pretend to fall asleep: so that anything that happened wouldn't be his fault, so that if conscience started pricking Speirs could claim he was a liar that much more effectively. But what he did do was to breathe out, sinking deeper into the bed, and look the company C.O. in the eye, hoping his assent was visible in his face, hoping that it wasn't.

For too long a moment he thought he'd imagined it – Speirs sat stone still, his thumb unmoving over the point of Lip's eyebrow; downstairs someone coughed, knocked over a tin mug, and woke up whoever else was sleeping down there. They listened in motionless silence as undefined voices grumbled and griped at each other, slowly disappearing back into breathy speechlessness, the even, hushed air of sleeping soldiers. Speirs's thumb resumed the same startlingly tender arc over Lip's eyebrow, and he lowered his face to Lipton's ear. In a whisper so low that it could have been mistaken for the rustle of clothes, the Easy Company C.O. murmured to his First Sergeant.

"You'd better be sure you want this."

Lip thought his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. His vocal cords didn't seem capable of giving an answer – _yes_ and _no_ were both unthinkable, the consequences of either appalling – and so he said nothing, his breath faster and his heart seem louder than it had been through any amount of shelling.

Speirs looked searchingly at him, decoding the set of his jaw and the slackness of his mouth. He reached the right conclusion, and the wrong one; the answer that appeased the mounting pressure in Lip's throat and belly and made his heart beat so that he thought they must be able to hear it in Berlin.

Ronald Speirs had lips like a boy half his age, a slight pout and a little too much of a curve in the upper to look as masculine as anyone reading his service record might expect. They tasted of coffee and sleep, unbrushed teeth and awkwardness. Carwood Lipton had lips that were made, right now, to be kissing them. He was giddy, now, Speirs' hands – hand, the other was even higher up his leg – against his cheek, and it was the fever that made him dizzy, it was the fever doing all of this.

Their noses bumped, their teeth clashed, Speirs' stubble felt abominable against Lip's, like it might start a fire … and it was the fifth, maybe the sixth, kiss he'd ever had in his life. The first to make him drop his jaw like a whore's drawers and act all passive while someone else pushed their way into his mouth; the first to make him mount a counter-attack that made his kissing partner groan. Come to that, he'd never heard a man groan before, except in pain or because Luz had told them a joke - not that pain and George Luz's impersonations weren't pretty darn close to each other.

But he was hearing the sound now, muffled by his own mouth, his own tongue, and he reckoned maybe half of this low, rumbling of lust was coming from him and not Speirs. Speirs who was kissing much like he smiled, fast and hungry, his teeth unexpectedly sharp against Lipton's lower lip. Speirs whose hand was groping blindly now through the blankets and layers of woollen clothing over his dick, just enough pressure reaching him through all that to stir it up – like the kissing hadn't been enough – and make him hard.

Lip wanted to jerk the blankets away - _fuck_ being sick - and feel Ron Speirs, lithe and strong and unfathomable, moving against him. He wanted to clamp the blankets around his head and pretend none of this was happening, that this was another horrifying fever-dream and that any minute now he'd wake up. His hips, answering to a different drummer, rose up against the palm of Speirs's hand.

And now he was shaking as well as shivering, his breath coming in thick, deep gasps that finally reached the bottom of his lungs, his nose clear out of sheer willpower, because hell if he was going to take his mouth off Speirs's for something as trivial as breathing. He sat up, holding Speirs's face as his was held, but both hands cupping his jaw, his neck, the rough beginnings of a beard scraping the calluses on his hands and urging him on.

As it turned out, he didn't need to struggle free of the blankets – Speirs grew impatient with them and tossed them on the floor with an inelegant kick, twisting to be sure he did not have to slide his tongue free of Lip's mouth. The next few moments were a flurry of sensation, and no matter how he wanted to remember them in detail all he could grasp of it was that he was still clothed, his whole body pressed against Speirs, and then there was a kind of horizontal dance, a grinding of hips and a clutching of upper arms and shoulders, and that he was so goddamned horny that he was starting to lose control of his mouth. Starting to mutter thankfully mangled endearments, pleading requests, anything, anything, into that clever mouth. Half of this barrage turned to wordless moaning; the other half was swallowed down in the crush of lips against his mouth, and his hips had a mind of their own, and Speirs was like a goddamned six foot eel against him. His uniform seemed to grow nerve endings and every brush against it made his stomach knot itself up even more.

And _then_ the shaking and the feverish shivering was over, and he was gonna have to scrounge a cloth tomorrow morning. All too soon, Speirs gave him a final, almost chaste kiss – certainly compared to the ones they had been exchanging – on his half-open lips and slipped back onto the floor. Handed him his blankets with an almost rueful look and stretched back out on the carpet.

"You do know what this means," he said, as Lip pulled the blankets around himself and tried not to think.

"Nothing?" Lip hazarded, turning to face the wall.

"Yes," Speirs said firmly, closing his eyes. "_Nothing_. Nothing changes."

He didn't need to add that it was an order. He didn't need to add that it could never happen again. He didn't need to tell Lipton he needed to forget. Whatever else he was (and he wasn't sure now that he knew), First Sergeant Carwood Lipton was not stupid.

> He fell into a deep sleep. In the morning, his fever had broken, his energy had returned. He went to the medical officer, who could not believe the improvement. The doctor called it a miracle.   
> __
> 
> Band of Brothers, "The Patrol", pg 224.


End file.
